


Caged

by Quillpaw



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe, Animal Transformation, Body Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-19
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2017-12-20 18:04:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/890227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillpaw/pseuds/Quillpaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a month and a half of being out of work, Desmond is getting desperate, and when Lucy tells him there's a job waiting for him with Abstergo, he jumps on the chance. There is one catch: he cannot discuss what he sees within Abstergo with anyone. Almost immediately, he finds out why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

Desmond's morning was routine. He wasn't sure he liked that. Not that he minded routine, going about mindless work, but the fact that _this_ is what had become routine is what worried him. He woke automatically at 10 AM, checked if he required a shower, generally decided he didn't, and proceeded to shuffle aimlessly around his apartment for the remainder of the day. It had been nice the first week or two, just like an extended vacation. Now it was just getting sad.

He let himself fall onto the couch with a grunt, booting up his laptop. He scrolled through his e-mails—Lucy, Lucy, spam, Lucy, more spam. He paused at the last message in the inbox, noting the sender with interest. Someone had contacted him about his application.

The tiny glimmer of hope was squashed further and further down as he read. _...with all due respect, Mr. Miles, our company simply cannot accept anyone unwilling or unable to provide..._ He didn't even bother finishing. Whatever they were asking for—high school diploma, college degree, birth certificate, proof of insurance, social security—he didn't have. He didn't know why he bothered anymore. Every single application, all turned down for one missing document or another. Desmond pressed the heels of his palms against his eyelids and muttered under his breath, cursing his parents, his stupid decisions, the bar for having the gall to run illegally and not bother to tell him.

"Desmond?" He looked up at the voice coming from the entranceway. "You'd better be wearing pants, I'm coming in anyway."

"I'm decent," he called back, after taking a moment to check that he was actually properly clothed.

"I doubt that, but as long as you've got pants on," Lucy retorted, her voice coming closer before her body joined it in the living room. She was still wearing her work ID, her bag still slung over one shoulder. She eyed the computer in Desmond's lap. "Any good news?"

Desmond sighed and set the computer aside. "Another rejection. I don't know why I fucking bother anymore. Nobody's going to hire a guy without any legal documentation. The only reason I got my old job is because I was the least illegal thing in the building—including the building!"

Rather than the usual sigh and shake of the head Lucy usually gave him, she smiled. "You'd be surprised, Desmond. Actually, I think I might have found something for you." When Desmond just stared at her blankly, she continued. "Warren has been working on a project in Genetics, some sort of gene therapy experiments. They're looking for someone to do security detail—really basic grunt work, and they're not being choosy."

Desmond let that process for a few moments, quickly shoving down the earlier glimmer of hope before it could properly show itself. "That's great and all, but Abstergo's still a huge, reputable, world-spanning company. They're _definitely_ not gonna hire someone without paperwork."

"I'm pretty sure they'd take a hobo off the streets if he can take a shower and sign a contract," Lucy said, still smiling. "I've already put in a good word about you to Warren. It'll probably be a few days before they make any decisions, but any prospect is better than no prospect, right? And if they say no, you not any worse off than if I'd never mentioned it."

Desmond sighed, slumping forward a bit, but did manage a smile. "...You're right. Thanks, Luce." He paused. "...If this actually works out, I'm gonna owe you forever."

"Why do you think I asked in the first place?" She grinned at him. "Come on, put on something you haven't been wearing the past three days. I'm getting you out of this apartment if it kills us both."

\--

The phone call came three days later at 8 in the morning. The person on the other end of the line didn't bother waiting for Desmond to become coherent. "You have out attention, Mr. Miles. We'll expect you at our main building in one week, 7 o'clock sharp, to test your compatibility with the job. No piercings, no loose clothing, no animal motifs." There was a click, and silence. Desmond stared blearily at his phone, working to process that information. He managed to open a note app on his phone and tap out "job 7 1 week no animals" before setting it aside and falling back to sleep.


	2. Two

For the most part, the week passed in the same homogenous haze as any other week. There was a brief moment of excitement when Desmond discovered his button-down shirt from his bartending job had a noticeable rip along the seam and a missing button, leading to a trip to the mall so that Lucy and Rebecca could buy him a set of "proper" shirts. ("Is that thing seriously the only nice shirt you own?" Rebecca had asked, laughing. "Dude, _I_ own more nice shirts than you do!") After that, it was back to waiting, and time had a way of fraying nerves.

Exactly one week later, Desmond arrived at Abstergo's main building. It was an impressive affair- a giant white skyscraper gleaming in the sunlight, reflective glass forming a cross pattern on each face. Around one side, a covered ramp led down below ground into the multi-level parking garage. Desmond parked his bike in a visitor's spot on the first level, nervously patting its side as he dismounted. He took a steadying breath, and made his way inside. It was a short ride up into the lobby area, and Desmond took a moment to be awestruck as he stepped out of the elevator. The place was just as massive as the outside implied, with glass walls dividing up various offices. People were everywhere, milling about aimlessly, bustling between offices with coffee and paperwork, or just standing around and chatting. There was so much going on, and only on the first floor. The place was nearly overwhelming.

"Mr. Miles?" A voice startled him out of his daze, and he turned sharply to face its owner, a petite brunette with a clipboard tucked up to her chest.

"Uh, yeah—Yes," he managed, running a hand through his hair.

"Dr. Vidic is waiting for you on sublevel C. I'll take you," the woman said, her tone clipped but not unfriendly. "But first, I need you to sign this." She held out the clipboard, producing a pen from somewhere on her person, offering it a moment later.  
Desmond took both, rather bemused. He looked down at the papers on the clipboard, trying to make sense of the formally-worded miniscule type without much success. "What is all this?"

"NDC," the woman said simply. When no look of comprehension dawned on Desmond's face, she elaborated. "Non-disclosure agreement. The job you're being considered for deals with highly sensitive information, things Abstergo does not want getting out to the public, or our competitors. By signing that, you agree to not reveal anything you see, hear, or experience in this building to anyone without proper clearance from Dr. Vidic and the board." Desmond nodded slowly, flipping to the last page of the document and signing on the line. As he did, she continued. "We take that agreement _very_ seriously, Mr. Miles. A previous employee broke that contract, and it cost him _much_ more than his job here." She took the clipboard and pen from him. "Everything seems to be in order. This way, please."

She led him to another set of elevators, stepping inside and taking him down into the basement levels of the facility. Despite being only the third level down, the elevator ride was disconcertingly long; Desmond mused that they had gone deeper than the entire parking garage by sublevel A. The woman said nothing the entire time, her gaze never leaving the display reading off their current level.

When the elevator came to a stop, she gestured to the open doors. "I don't have clearance beyond this point. Go straight down the hall, Dr. Vidic will be waiting for you near the end, by his office." She paused. "I don't know what they're working on down here, Mr. Miles, I only know what I've been instructed to tell you."

"And...what's that?" Desmond asked, feeling less and less certain of this job by the minute.

"Nothing behind the glass can hurt you, but it would be best not to antagonize them." She pressed the button to return to the lobby. "Best of luck, Mr. Miles."

"Hey, wait a minute!" Desmond reached out to catch the elevator doors, but they slid shut too quickly. "What's that supposed to mean?!" He exhaled harshly, reluctantly turning away from the elevator. Ahead of him was a hallway that seemed endless, the walls made of thick, reinforced glass, lit by fluorescent lights high overhead. He took a steadying breath, and began to walk.

As he looked about him he saw that the glass walls were not walls at all, but windows. Each one looked into a moderately-sized room, like a zoo exhibit, each decorated differently, each holding a single occupant. Desmond paused at each one, trying to see what sort of animal rested inside.  
One enclosure was filled with branches, good for climbing in and on, with piles of soft objects forming a strange nest on the floor. A boy, barely in his teens, was dozing in the pile, something black and feathery drawn about him like a blanket. Another was more of a tank than a room, filled primarily with water, with some sand and rocks lining the bottom. Desmond stopped, trying to peer into the murky darkness, pulling back when a large dark shape flashed past, too quick to make out anything but a finned tail. With each enclosure he passed, his unease grew more and more. All of the creatures contained in this hall...some appeared human, but most did not. It was like something out of a horror film.

He was nearing the end of the hall now, and reluctantly stopped at one of the final exhibits, cautiously peering inside. This one was set up to look like a swamp; it was made to _feel_ like one too, if the layer of condensation on the inside of the glass was any indication. He barely had time to register movement from within before something large slammed against the glass. Desmond let out a yelp and fell backwards, landing hard on the floor and staring at the creature. It was humanoid, but only barely, with dark, mottled, leathery skin with ridges running down the arms and back, and a thick, heavy tail running out behind it. Its fingers and toes were webbed and its nails were long and clawlike, lacking dexterity. Its face still had a humanoid bone structure, and was vaguely feminine, though its nose was flattened into slits, and its mouth was full of far too many pointed teeth, with a thin pale scar across its lips. Dark hair was tied into braids that fell messily around its face and shoulders, failing to conceal the yellow, reptilian eyes. It snarled at him, the sound muffled by the glass, and slammed its paws furiously against the wall of its containment. When it realized it couldn't get at Desmond, it snorted once, sliding down into the murky water and retreating from view.

It took Desmond several moments to find his voice. "...What the _fuck_?!"

"Bad luck that you had to meet Aveline first, Mr. Miles. She's not very fond of men." A hand reached out to help him to his feet, and Desmond accepted it gratefully. Once standing, he found himself facing an older man with graying hair and a neatly trimmed beard, smiling at him in a way that made Desmond vaguely uneasy.

"...Dr. Vidic," he guessed, shaking the hand that had helped him up. "Lucy's told me about you."

"She was rather happy to tell me about you, too," was all Vidic said, still wearing that not-entirely-friendly smile. "You haven't run screaming for the elevator yet, so I assume you're still interested in the position."

Desmond looked over his shoulder, at the long rows of tanks behind him. "...I gotta admit, it's definitely freaky. But I'm _really_ curious." He looked back to Vidic. "What exactly am I going to be doing here? Some kind of security detail?"

Vidic started to walk down the hall, gesturing for Desmond to follow. "Of a sort. We have a number of guards and caretakers in charge of a handful of specimens, and we have one group currently in need of a new one." Desmond glanced back at the swampy tank, the idea mildly panicking, but Vidic noticed and just chuckled. "No, you won't be in charge of Aveline. Here, I'll introduce you to your charges." He had led Desmond down a second side hall, this one with notably less visible exhibits than the main hall. The far end of the hall was lined entirely in glass, revealing three large holding rooms, each housing a single figure. Three pairs of bright gold eyes focused on Desmond in an instant, all predatory, all distrustful, all hungry.

"Mr. Miles, meet Altair, Ezio, and Connor. Your job will be to oversee their care- _if_ you accept the position, of course."


	3. Three

Time seemed to grind to a halt. Desmond found himself frozen under those three stares; his breathing and heartbeat sounding abnormally loud in his ears. He heard Vidic's voice from somewhere far away, and a hand at his shoulders steered him away from the tanks. He felt three pairs of eyes boring into his back as they went.  
When the haze finally cleared from his mind, he was sitting in a spacious office, facing Vidic who was seated behind a neatly organized desk. "I have to...take care of _them_?" was the first thing out of Desmond's mouth, his voice faint. Vidic smiled at him.

"Only if you take the job. Those three are extremely valuable to us- they represent an investment of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours of work. They are delicate specimens, Mr. Miles, and require their own security. This is important work- you'd be paid well for it." Desmond just looked at him, waiting for him to elaborate. Vidic smiled thinly and moved a sheet of paper across the desk for Desmond to inspect. He did, and nearly choked at the number of digits written there. "I'll take that as you finding the pay sufficient." Vidic took the paper from him and neatly ripped it into eight pieces.

"I—" Desmond quickly caught the 'No shit' between his teeth before it could spill out. "Yeah, no, that's—that'll be great. Just watch some creepy animal people all day, that's fine."  
Vidic's expression turned serious. "They aren't 'people', Mr. Miles, and if you're going to last in this setting, you'll need to get that idea out of your head right now. They may look human, speak like humans, and on occasion, act like humans, but they are not human by any stretch of the imagination. They are _animals_ , and you can't let anything they do or say fool you into thinking otherwise." Slowly, Desmond nodded, more than little confused, which seemed to be Vidic's cue to shift topics. "I expect to see you here tomorrow morning at 6 AM to train you and get you on the job as quickly as we can." He leaned back slightly in his chair. "That will be all, Mr. Miles."

Desmond started to feel that working with this man was going to give him more than his fair share of whiplash. He wondered how Lucy could stand it. He got to his feet, thanked the man again, and made his way out and towards the elevator when Vidic didn't offer him any more pleasantries. Most of the other creatures were coming awake in their tanks, moving closer to the glass to observe him as he walked by. Aveline in particular was watching him with keen interest, hissing a bit as he passed too close to her and causing him to jump back. They weren't human. None of them were.

He spent the agonizingly long elevator ride back to the surface in a dreamlike haze, and with each passing second the tanks and monsters below seemed more and more like some bizarre fantasy, a stress dream before his actual interview for guarding perfectly normal specimens for perfectly normal gene therapy experiments. But then he would remember those three pairs of eyes boring into him, sizing him up like meat, and that relieving train of thought crumbled back down around him.

\----x----

"And, to cap off the night's festivities," Shaun said, with exaggerated importance, "a toast to our own Desmond Miles, who actually managed to laboriously crawl his way out of unemployment and into a hopefully more fruitful, _legal_ place in the world."

"Oh, shut up," Desmond grumbled, rolling his eyes. "I got another job. It's not like Christ himself came down and handed it to me. I _am_ a dependent adult."

"A dependent adult who needs his girlfriend's help to get a real job," Shaun shot back neatly, smirking victoriously at the slight flush that started in Desmond's cheeks.

"Ah, give him a break, Shaun! Who cares how he got the job, it's great that he got it! Super top secret work for Abstergo, huh?" Rebecca grinned. "Come on, Des, give us the juicy details! What kind of creepy mutants are they hiding in there?"

It took Desmond a precious few moments to think of how to answer that, images of yellow-eyed monsters and boys with wings flashing through his head. "It's not that exciting," he said finally. "It's some experimental gene therapy stuff. Uhh, I didn't get much of a look, but I guess it's like, mixing animal and human DNA? To treat diseases and stuff." That had to be believable right?

Thankfully, Shaun seemed to buy it, nodding. "Right, lots of places jumping on that bandwagon since they amended the Human Chimera Prohibition Act," he noted. "Mostly embryonic work, I'd bet, maybe a few adult animal specimens with human liver cells or the like."

"You would know about that crap," Rebecca said, taking a swig of her beer before continuing. "Man, I was hoping for like...cat-people."

"Still illegal, Rebecca," Shaun said with a long-suffering sigh. "Animals with minor alterations from human cells are fine but messing with human embryos is still a no-go. They want scientific progression, not to have lynch mobs forming in the streets."

"Desmond?" Lucy said quietly, concerned. "Everything alright?"

"Yeah, fine," Desmond muttered as he got to his feet. "Just—just remembered something I need to do at home. I'll—I'll see you guys later." He left quickly, ignoring the faintly confused questions from the girls and Shaun's more vocal protests. He made his way home at a reckless pace, thoughts whirling through his mind as his motorcycle weaved through evening traffic. The creatures he was supposed to be guarding, that he was being paid frankly embarrassing amounts of money to look after—illegal. The NDA, the receptionist's cryptic words, Vidic's behavior all clicked rather violently into place, and he felt like an idiot for not making the connection back when he still had the chance to back out.

Was it too late? What if he went in tomorrow and told Vidic to take his pile of cash and shove it? They must know that they'd given Desmond a huge amount of leverage over them, they must know that at any time he could alert every media outlet in the country that a respected, world-spanning company was performing some of the most diabolical human experiments in modern history.

_The last employee to break the contract lost_ much _more than just his job..._

Desmond's stomach sunk unpleasantly. If he tried to break it off, there was no way he'd escape unscathed. They wouldn't believe he'd simply take that knowledge and quietly sit on it—they'd need insurance from him, and whatever insurance they chose to take didn't look too great for him. He was trapped, then, wasn't he? He stumbled into his apartment, shutting the door and leaning against it.

"When I said I wanted a job," he said, addressing the ceiling for lack of an audience. "I was hoping _less_ illegal than the last one."  
He made his way over to the couch collapsing onto it and pulling his laptop closer. He started browsing his e-mail with a sour lack of enthusiasm, putting all messages from potential—legal—job opportunities into his spam folder. The final message to go in the folder wasn't a rejection letter, but legitimate spam that had snuck around the filter to begin with. He paused on it briefly, glancing it over before sending it off with the rest of the worthless junk. He heaved a sigh, shut the computer down, and threw himself onto his bed, hoping he would be able to get any amount of sleep before he was expected in the next day. At this rate, it wasn't likely. He sighed deeply, closed his eyes, and didn't give the odd e-mail a second thought.

_From: 16_  
To: Desmond Miles  
Subject: 17 

_we need to talk_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (whoo boy this one took forever! not because i'm waffling on what to do, just...wow how do i turn this plot into words that people can read dang. i'll try to get the next chapter coming soon, since some actually fun interesting stuff happens in it!
> 
> just one quick note for the chapter itself: the human chimera prohibition act is a thing, you can look it up, i think it's really interesting. it hasn't been amended in real life, obviously, but for the sake of this fic some political weight has been tossed around and now we can make little mutant monsters for science. yay!)


End file.
